silver

Immediately starting the entry with spoilers, so it all goes under the cut.

( Mirror Dance )

Continuing through Cetaganda and two short stories:

( Cetaganda )

I'm so incredibly late to reading this and very much should have read it so much sooner, but it's been eating my brain. I read Shards of Honour years ago and enjoyed it, but was stymied by the knowledge that most of the series is about Miles - I generally hate it when book sequels go to the next gen, so I never pursued the further books. I really should have, because it turns out I really like them! I really like space opera/military SF in general, and these are just so good.

I'm in a bunch of book clubs and for one of them we decided to read The Warrior's Apprentice, based on C's recommendation on where we should start. So I read it. And I loved it. A few days later I was getting dinner with another friend in another book club (I have too many book clubs) and was telling K about how much I enjoyed The Warrior's Apprentice & The Vor Game, the next in sequence, and K was like "oh, I love those books!". K is in another book club with C with me, so when we met, we discussed the actual book we had chosen, and then devoted the rest of the time to Vorkosigan. The next meeting is going to be "whatever book I can get to", with K saying she'd like to discuss Memory, but only if I can make it there. Both C and K have read them all, so we tentatively set Memory as a goal, and this book club may temporarily just turn into us discussing Vorkosigan until I suppose I read all of them. As of Feb 15, I am absolutely going to make it to Memory, as I've just finished Mirror Dance. Though I need to force myself to take a break. I finished The Warrior's Apprentice on January 18th, and since then I have read Mountains of Mourning, The Vor Game, Cetaganda, Labyrinth, Borders of Infinity, Shards of Honour (having forgotten all the plot from my first reading, this felt just like a new book), Barrayar, Brothers in Arms, and Mirror Dance. I took a break in the middle in various places to try to read other books, but it was kind of difficult because I just wanted to keep going with Vorkosigan. I have copies of a bunch of omnibus editions, which also makes it so easy to just keep going.

I have so many feelings.

I have read 29 books so far, not counting re-reads.

Best Book You've Read So Far
This is difficult, but probably Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee. It's such a gem of a book, does really novel things, and despite the confusion caused by being plunged right into the action, does have all the information contained in the book, seeded here and there. Very satisfying.

Best Sequel You're Read So Far
Hm. Red Side Story was okay, but probably the prize goes to the two other novels in the Machineries of Empire series (Yoon Ha Lee). Sometimes when book 1 is very good, books 2/3 tend to be disappointing, but I really didn't feel that way. Well, OK, the ending to book 3 I kind of felt a little flat about, but then there was a short story that fixed that all up for me again ("Glass Cannon") :D

New release you haven't read yet, but want to
Lyorn, by Steven Brust. I really want to but I am currently in about 4 book clubs, which kind of happened accidentally, so I have a lot to read right now.

Most anticipated release for the second half of the year
I am so bad at keeping up. Sherry Thomas just released the newest Lady Sherlock book, which I need to read!

Biggest disappointment
The Wolf Who Loved Me by Lydia Dare, which was somehow both disappointing on a romance level and on a werewolf level :(
Also the first 1/3 of 2001: A Space Odyssey, for the garbage anthropology that made me almost quit. The entire premise of the book is that our primate ancestors were too stupid, incurious, and feeble to ever become humans, that our humanity and qualities in ourselves that we prize come from outer space. Which as a human is just so insulting; plus over the years we have accumulated a lot of anthropological evidence showing that our species' flexibility, ability to learn, and care for others is actually very deeply rooted in our hominin past. I understand Clarke is making a point. His point is stupid.

Biggest surprise
I did not expect to like The Forgotten Beasts of Eld so much. I think if I had read this when I was fourteen, it would have briefly or maybe permanently become part of my personality. Even now I feel shaken a little.

Favorite new author
Hm, I've read two Loretta Chase novels and liked both, so probably her for now. Sometimes I find liking one book by an author kind of like striking gold once and not liking the rest (as much, or at all) so having two is always a good thing. I'm quite capable of liking one book by one author and then going on a wholesale tear through all their works - I am slowly reading all of Ngaio Marsh, though her books can be very uneven in quality - but sometimes it is worth it and sometimes it is not. Especially romance, occasionally it really is just one book that hits my buttons just right and all the rest of the back catalogue are meh.

Newest Fictional Crush
Shuos Jedao from Machineries of Empire, undoubtedly. He's just so good at things, and I am so weak to that.

Newest Favorite Character
Sybel from The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

Book That Made You Cry
I don't think any books so far.

Book That Made You Happy
So many of these books! Starter Villain by John Scalzi was a fun romp with cats. The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren was pretty sweet and funny.

What Books Do You Need to Read by the End of the Year?
I am 3/6th of the way through my Hugo Best Novel read this year, and am for once actually going to finish!! Other than that, I am pretty much just doing my usual, reading books for book clubs and trying to catch up on my TBR, pretty free-form.

Books I read this year!

Continuing on my "silver refuses to pay a monthly subscription to continue access to Excel (even though she loves Excel)" journey, I have kept a log of what I read this year in my paper journal. I'm really bad about updating it though, so I know there are books missing, and can't remember...oh well. This only counts books I read cover to cover and for the first time.

I have way more 10/10 books in the beginning of the year than the end. I read a lot more nonfiction this year! I didn't do any reading challenges, I picked up a library summer reading one, but didn't end up doing it. Here are the highlights!

( Non fiction )

In fiction ( fantasy )

( science fiction )

( And other books I read )

Finally books I especially disliked, with very short notes otherwise I could write several thousands of words.
( really didn't like these )

Another one I really enjoyed. Attempting to talk about involves so many spoilers though so:

( Issola!! )

I finished the Book of Jhereg (Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla) a few weeks back and just realized I forgot to post about them here.

The library does not have books 6,7,8 or 9, despite having all the books around it, neither ebook nor print. I'm not sure why and this isn't the first time this library system (big city decent budget) has had these kinds of issues - their SF/F acquisitions seems to be very patchwork. I'm not expecting them to have super obscure or old titles, but this is neither. Also they got all the other books around them! I put in a request for the two as omnibuses and they were approved right away, so I'll read them soon.

On to the thoughts! I really enjoyed them, one of the reasons I'm mad again at acquisitions is I wanted to just keep reading, damn it.

( spoilers for Jhereg, Yendi, Teckla )

This entry took ages, I read Athyra last night (thanks to hamsterwoman!) But I'm too tired to write up thoughts about that. Next time!

I finished the first half of Book of Taltos which (after some wikipedia-ing) I think was originally published as a novel, and I've got the omnibus, where Taltos is paired with Phoenix. Normally you can just tell from the whole outside packaging but when I read in ebook I have no idea how long anything is and I skip the frontismatter anyway :P

I enjoyed it a lot! It's about Vlad, an Easterner (human) who lives in Dragaera (elf city) and who gets roped into a very dangerous rescue mission with someone he's basically just met.

One thing I really enjoyed is the utter deadpan of the narration, which is first person from Vlad. Especially because he's an assassin. There's so much where Vlad is describing what's going on, and what he thinks is going to happen, it's a ridiculous situation and very dangerous, and then he just goes, "So then I just nailed [killed] him." Everything is so casual, even when it's clearly a ton of work to go about killing his target, or it's life-or-death. I really am into super competent characters, so this was Excellent. Vlad also has a way of understatement at all times, so it's fun to read between the lines and think about what he's actually saying. A lot of what he says isn't what he feels - either because he doesn't want to admit it or he just wants to tell you something entertaining, I suppose. The prose is otherwise pretty light on description and the writing is very transparent/modern - there's not a lot to look at there. The interest is mostly in what happens and how Vlad talks about it, and it was really entertaining.

The other interesting thing was the three storylines - past, present, future. Each chapter is fairly short and mostly has all three happening. It took me until awhile into the book to realize the 'past' parts were gonna show up in each chapter, and then near the end I realized how the 'future' sections linked in. Eventually the 'present' and 'future' sections joined up, and I really enjoyed that. It's gave the book a different dimension and I also think it was a great way to explain something (magic working) which is hard to explain without infodumping and not have it bog down the action, which is reaching a climax at that particular point. I also quite like the device generally - I think the last time I read it was Ancillary Justice (which is exceptional), but where the two lines of the story met was such a great moment, and you really understood what was going on.

Also for some reason I kept reading this at the very end of the day when I was almost asleep so I probably will find a lot more to enjoy in the re-reads. Now reading Phoenix!

I finished reading this a little ago and thought I would post about it. Unfortunately I haven't been really active in posting and it's partly because I now work from home, and I've become so sick of my desk space that I usually get up as soon as I'm done and go some place else. It is stunting some of my other activities too (paper journalling, art, linocut).

However! I honestly really enjoyed reading a lot of this. Note: I am not a biologist. I am just someone who likes science and really likes natural history and has been reading about it. And this was a book aimed at the non-scientist audience. It's very readable, has clear arguments and chapter summaries, and doesn't go into too much detail but instead summarizes the conclusions.

The chapter on natural selection - absolutely incredible. It was so satisfying to read. He got it right. He really, really did, and he wrote it in 1859, long before we knew how variation arose. He said that of the ways these mutations (I use this word, he doesn't) were created, "we are profoundly ignorant". And he still got it right. This is one of my favourite things about human beings - the ability to synthesize multiple, disparate, and small pieces of evidence into the right idea. I think it is so cool that we can look at what would be otherwise inconsequential detail, but using what we observe and thinking through the antecedents/results, can piece together truthful ideas.

Some of the chapters, like the ones on hybrids, I found hard to sort through or found not that interesting. One of the difficulties for me was just the gap in time and the different terms. Darwin talks about varieties versus species - species and subspecies? - and many other terms which have fallen out of favour. The general frustration over how difficult it is to classify species - the species problem - is one that I don't think we might ever solve. It's fundamentally the problem of where a species ends and one begins, and the fact that every individual in a population is ever so slightly different creates a giant headache. He struggles to explain the frequent sterility in crossing different species (eg often chromosomal anomalies - but of course, the recent news about the paddlefish x sturgeon cross means even us with all the intervening 150 years of knowledge are still sometimes surprised). There's also various Victorian concepts on primitive vs higher order animals are, and so on.

It interests me that Darwin opens not with natural selection, but artificial selection created by breeding. It makes sense - it is hard to deny the incredible changes that we have created even over our small lifespans for domesticated animals; doing so would pretty much invalidate whole hobbies and a great deal of agriculture. And also that pigeon-breeding has really gone out of fashion these days - while some activities like dog breeding apparently continues apace, we don't really seem to want pouter pigeons or whatever.

Also, I don't think I'll ever have the patience of many biologists in the painstaking, tedious process of crossing and recrossing various individuals to see how their offspring turn out. I have the highest respect but my god, that must take forever. And you have to hand-fertilize plants! Ahh!

In 1859 not only did we not know about DNA, or mutations arising from errors in copying the genome, gene flow & founders' effect, we also didn't know about tectonic plates and their movements, collisions, and the fact that the earth's continents have been reshaped many many times. Darwin talks about the distribution (biogeography) of species and how it seems that those isolated on islands are usually clearly seeded from the nearest land, and almost exclusively from animals and plants that can make the oceanic journeys - so birds and reptiles and many plants whose seeds can be dispersed by wind and water, but not large mammals, which would find it difficult to swim or raft so far, nor amphibians, who need fresh water. And he says quite pointedly that these patterns of living beings' habitats are cleanly explained by them having to disperse, but difficult to imagine why they would be individually created and put there in such odd patterns. But he struggles to explain the geological record and how fossils are preserved, or to explain why identical species are on different continents now. Because he doesn't know that one location might have been in a completely different location, he can only say that the fossil site might have been underwater at some point and therefore had sediment deposited over the animals, preserving them. And more than that, geology/geography is so imperfect here. This is before radiometric dating is possible - so none of them have any idea how actually old anything is. They can infer that rock piled above is younger than the rock below, but how much further, no idea. Darwin mentions that they haven't found fossils before the Silurian, but it's hard for me to tell (as someone reading in 2020) if he means the Silurian as the GTS currently defines it (mid-Paleozoic, 443-419 mya), or a different definition, as the definitions have shifted over time. (Is this pre-split before they inserted the Devonian period? No idea. Will not muddle internal GTS memorization by trying to add the history of the geologic time scale).

Reading about the imperfections of the fossil record is also interesting. I can't remember if he mentions how little of the earth's geology has been explored at that point, but it's pitifully small. With only Europe somewhat explored, and bits of Australia, America, and Canada, it's a pathetically small sample. Even the Burgess Shale, which is in (for an Englishman) accessible Canada, wasn't discovered until 1909 (and the full significance realized much later). So many incredible fossils still to be discovered and classified, which gives us such a better view of what ancient life was like - and with the advent much better stratigraphy using absolute dating, plus putting together dots so we can use eg molecular clock analysis to even estimate ages with DNA - it's such an incomplete picture of an (already) patchy record.

As someone who has spent significant time trying to wrap her head around how unbelievably long 4.5 billion years are, and has mostly managed to get an OK grasp on the GTS's periods and epochs, I enjoyed this passage:

He who can read Sir Charles Lyell's grand work on the Principles of Geology, which the future historian will recognise as having produced a revolution in natural science, yet does not admit how incomprehensively vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume.

It's so hard! We are not equipped to think correctly about thousands of years, much less millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, thousands of millions.

In the last few chapters, he emphasizes that the system towards which naturalists trying to classify life are groping towards is one of genealogy, of descent. And he is right. I only wish I understood taxonomy better. I learned ecology and molecular biology well enough, but I never did taxonomy. I need a good book to help, but I miss having access to university libraries.

I also enjoyed that there is much namedropping of other scientists. He's clear in the text that various assertions are made by so-and-so, with whom he has a correspondence, and will namecheck this person or that on the subject of e.g. fossilized land-shells in Madeira.

However, it was really enjoyable to read in a lot of ways. I wish he could have seen the ensuing discoveries and all the evidence that has been collected. The last chapter, as he sums up all the chapters and puts forward his argument, is especially beautiful.

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Hello flist! I post so sporadically now - I've become one of those people that apologizes for this! But I am resolved to post book reviews this year of everything I read (that is not embarrassing, lol) that I finish.

My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir

Nonfiction, journal. John Muir was a great lover of the natural world and the American Sierra especially, and the founder of the Sierra Mountain Club. It was pretty wonderful to read this. He was asked by a friend to assist moving sheep up to mountain pasture in Yosemite, accepted with great joy, and wrote a few paragraphs or pages every day.

You can absolutely read the love and wonder and delight he took in the natural surroundings in every entry he writes. He observes the clouds, and describes the rivers and streams, and notes down the little animal life and big animal life alike, from squirrels to bears. He catalogues and notes the botany too - the flowers and shrubs and trees - and there is much to observe as they move the sheep from the dry California scrub up through the greener mountain shoulder up till they start to thin out again from the altitude. He is just so full of admiration and joy, and it never ceases, it's refreshing to read.

I also enormously enjoyed his anecdotes of the people and the sheep especially. Sheep are pretty stupid and his accounts, interspersed here and there between the observation of Yosemite, of how he and the shepherd struggle to get them through various difficulties is both wry and hilarious. He doesn't have the money to just hare off into the mountains and bring enough supplies, so he jumps at these chances, but I wish I could read an entire book of John Muir's anecdotes about shepherding or something. They were so entertaining! 8/10



The Art of Theft by Sherry Thomas

Mystery, historical fiction. This is the fourth book in Thomas's Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte Holmes pretends that her brother is an invalid and acts as his speaker and his eyes and ears, but of course it is her doing all the analysis, with some help from Mrs Watson. Charlotte is from a middle class family who wants to social climb, and Charlotte deliberately ends up ruining her reputation and getting away.

The books have one central mystery but the overall characters progress, we learn more about what's going on. I found that this one was easier to get into, and I liked the resolution of the plot. I do kind of forget how the different relationships are twisted though - I know the ACD canon very well and between books, forget how certain characters are related or who is who and what's a nod to what (there are Stapletons - no relation or association to Baskerville for example). And I found Thomas's writing sometimes really great and the conceits great - I enjoy Charlotte's conception of Maximum Tolerable Chins - but sometimes it falls short. I don't know. Maybe I've read too many of her books. I still think the romance is the strongest part.

Also, I think that the Lady Sherlock books must take place in the same universe as some of her other books. Miss Redmayne is studying to be a doctor - I think she is the fully-fledged physician that tends to Lady Helena. 7/10



Early Riser by Jasper Fforde

Post-apocalyptic, satire. In this future, the planet has gotten very cold, and to cope, humans hibernate - but not well. Some just never wake again, or they will partially wake and wander around like zombies. But it's not a planet of howling winters like Hoth with no infrastructure - it's one with a lot of corporate wealth at stake. Morphenox, a drug that mostly makes sure you survive the winter (except for that pesky zombifying thing), is manufactured by a massive pharmaceutical company.

I have so many thoughts about this novel. I'm actually having trouble getting them out because I have so many.

1. Jasper Fforde didn't write a book for...several years, before this came out. Before this, I think he wrote one a year. As someone who checked his website periodically to see when the Shades of Grey sequel would come out (please Fforde, you left us on a cliffhanger!) he actually writes he had an inexplicable and distressing period where he apparently just didn't write. And about this novel, that he sat down to try to write something that he eventually realized was not him - he tried to write something that was someone else, so he had to slash and rewrite it many times, and put himself back into it. He certainly does wry post-apocalyptic absurdity, but he does it with his own humour (this last clause is my thoughts, not what he said). And he also mentions that it's very anvilicious, but that there are times you just have to. This is just after 2016.

2. I can see all of that. Personally, I love Fforde's comic absurdity - I like absurdity generally, and I find his to be very entertaining. I absolutely love the weird (and impossible) inventions. But I felt the ending was weirdly not grim enough. It's a deeply messed up world - Morphenox's motto of equality in sleep is obviously undercut by the fact that only the rich can afford it (and to make it through the winter), plus the fact there's a small chance you'll become braindead and then treated as not-a-human and reassigned to the menial or dangerous tasks that no one wants to do, free slave labour. The book's obviously in response to our current problems; there are some books you don't need publishing metadata to know when it was published. The world has cooled almost catastrophically instead of warming. But all the other things of the world, the social parts, are still there. There are still huge corporations which may have started as small operations and for the benefit of others, but which have taken on a life of their own and become this juggernaut crushing anyone and everyone in the pursuit of expansion and profit. There's all the weird fairy tales and urban legends that spring up among a community, except centered very tightly around Winter. There's collateralized debt. There's much larger infrastructure around adoption and foster homes, because if there's a high risk of death every year obviously there'll be shifts.

3. However, I do know Shades of Grey pretty well and that familiarity made me more aware, I think, of the similarities between the two. There's a very similar protagonist in Eddie (SoG) and Charlie (ER). The baffling society that both operate in - though I suppose SoG's is governmental and ER's is corporate - also ring similarly. I mention it mostly because I find this kind of thing to be incredibly distracting, but I'm not sure it actually bothers other people. I don't mind this in a series, and in fact am quite happy to accept it then, but when authors or other artists create separate works and it still makes me think always of their other work, it distracts me a lot.

4. I do really enjoy all the wordplay that Fforde always brings. The Winter exerts an incredibly strong pressure on the society (maybe too strong - I mean this in a Doyalist way). Therefore there are different despised social roles, for example. Those who don't sleep through are seen as drains on society's resources, as they burn more in food while others are sleeping, they're Winsomniacs. Or there are nomads that exist outside of the general society (Womads). So many new terms, all winterized. I find them extremely entertaining, though in the beginning as they were being introduced in rapid succession, somewhat overwhelming. I still think even a society so shaped by Winter would still have new words that do not refer to winter so overtly, though.

5. It's set in Wales and Fforde has a nice selection of photos on his site about it, plus extra contextual information on how he reversed a lot of the Beeching cuts, though of course the train doesn't run in the winter. You only realize about 75% of the way through that they're not speaking English but Welsh (I enjoyed this) and also that's when you find out the Villains, which I had mentally grouped in a class like Womads, also outside of the general society, are English. I'm not sure what to say, except that's definitely very pointed, but Fforde can do what he wants. It was pretty entertaining though.

Overall, 8/10. The similarities to SoG just bothered me otherwise it'd have been higher.



How-To by Randall Munroe

Nonfiction, humour. This is I think Munroe's third book, and it's his book about how to do things just taken to hilarious extremes. After all, you can always just add a few more zeros to your input values!

I love xkcd and Munroe and absolutely loved this book. xkcd is a very long running series with a lot of content, and I think you can get a good sense of who Munroe is as a person from it - endlessly curious, willing to dig into the guts of things to find information, unabashedly interested in space and physics and robots and the natural world altogether, plus sf/f, and also, honestly, kind. He also has a pretty deadpan kind of humour too - the kind that looks at moon-sized-balls-of-moles and goes "huh". And that comes across very well here. It's never dry, even though it includes plenty of equations and stuff so you can follow along with the math.

I also admire Munroe's research. He often tries to model complex scenarios - not unusual - but also weird and funny ones, so there are a lot of calculations (including on xkcd/what-if) that are footnoted with approximations from a random obscure paper, because that was the closest he could get. There's an absolutely amazing chapter where he basically calls up Chris Hadfield, the astronaut, and asks him dozens of very specific scenarios to hear what Hadfield would recommend in order to land yourself safely. It was just so cool to read about and Hadfield has definitely put a huge amount of thought into it - he was a test pilot first, and has enormous amounts of experience in just this subject, and it's an absolutely fascinating interview. Seriously, worth the price of admission alone.

Also absolute gems are the sports chapter. Like I said before, it's pretty easy to slide into being derisive about things you don't like and care about, but Munroe isn't - he just adds his own twist on how sports might work. It ends up with estimates about the Rohirrim's charge through orcs. Really, overall great. 10/10



Field Manual For the Amateur Geologist by Alan Cvancara

Nonfiction, geology/science. I picked this up as well as another short introduction, because I don't know much about geology and it was sort of becoming more apparent as I was learning more about paleontology. Fossils are rock!

I can't rate it on how accurate it is, being a complete amateur. Cvancara goes through the various landforms and how they are molded - by the plate tectonics, or wind, or waves, or rivers, or glaciers - as well as rock type (my head spins, there are too many, can't we just crush up a sample and just mass-spectrometer it or something). Then, he also has a few interesting chapters like "how to start a rock collection" (be alert, be ethical, organize it in some way for heaven's sake), or "how to pan for gold" (fascinating), "broadly how petro-geologists look for oil" and such. I felt he didn't define terms enough sometimes and wasted it on instead including pronunciation guides on words that are pretty common - seriously, I'd rather you just gave a definition. It's quite compact - there's a lot of ground covered in not much space.

I also have new admiration for geologists. So many of the formations seem so similar at first glance and even at second or third glances. Plus, and this must be so aggravating, when you are interested in the rock underlying us, so much of the world is overlaid with soil and plants (sometimes thickly, in forests) and also human infrastructure - so you can't exactly peel them off and see underneath it. Cvancara advises you to look for anywhere the ground is cut into, like by a river or even in a man-made cut, like the passes blown through rock to make highway roads straight.

Also! This book was published in the 1990's and it is so 90's in so many ways. He helpfully includes detail to help you get more information. For example, send off to this PO box by mail to get maps. There's no mention whatsoever of GPS or satellites. And the naming of the geological ages - which I am at least slightly familiar with - are a little different, reflecting the changes that have been made in the intervening 30 years to the GTS. It was pretty entertaining! 8/10